Cultural Division

 Posted by  Immigration, Poverty, Racism, The Media  No Responses »
Nov 202007
 

In his New York Times editorial today, David Brooks argues that American society has become increasingly splintered along racial and ethnic lines. The bulk of his evidence comes from the world of music. He notes that the artists and audience for rock bands is increasingly white-only, and that as a result modern rock bands don’t have the mass appeal that the great bands from previous generations had. He ends by noting the following:

We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Of course anyone who has actually turned on VH1 (in the middle of the night when they are showing actual videos–hey, insomnia happens…) or read the production sheet on a pop music album lately understands that Mr. Brooks is 100% wrong. But in this case, why Mr. Brooks is wrong says quite a lot about white America.

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More Fair and Balanced News

 Posted by  The Media  4 Responses »
Nov 162007
 

Big national news over at foxnews.com: a Boy Scout “support the troops” drive to put donation boxes at the city’s polling places last Tuesday, only to have them removed later after a resident complained that the boxes amounted to a political message.  It is against state law to display political messages within 150 feet of polling places on election day.  Apparently a miscommunication within the office of the local election board caused the problem; the Boy Scouts had been given a verbal OK, but when a complaint came in the person in charge that day couldn’t find any documentation, and so she ordered the boxes removed.

Even as a local news story this report would be a waste of time, although it at least has a nice lead in to encourage people to donate books, toiletries, etc. to local soldiers in the field.  Over at Fox, you’d think this was one of the big news stories of the day.  (Never mind the Democratic presidential debate, the incredibly deadly storm in Bangladesh, etc.)  Under the headline: “Scouts Honor is City’s Shame”, the article is summarized as “Boys wanted to collect care packages for troops, but ‘The People’s Republic of Cambridge’ said ‘no’ it’s ‘political’”.  Click on the story, and you can see a link labeled ‘VIDEO: Cops bust Boy Scouts for being too “pro-war”‘.

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An Unsatiable Thirst

 Posted by  Fiscal Issues, Foreign Policy  2 Responses »
Nov 152007
 

There is one issue upon which it seems that every candidate agrees: that the United States military needs to be larger. Of course, they differ in what that means exactly: Obama and Clinton have talked about increasing the number of Special Forces and Military Police to better fight the war on terror, while the Republicans talk about expanding the size of American ground forces–I guess because they think it’s a problem that we can’t invade and occupy both Iraq and Iran simultaneously.

But campaigns are about one-upping your opponents. And I suppose because Fred Thompson was last into the race, he’s decided he needs to be first in military expansion: he has proposed that the United States of America needs a one million man ground force (775,000 Army, 225,000 Marines) and that annual American military spending needs to minimally be 4.5% of total GDP.

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Roman Catholic voting

 Posted by  Uncategorized  3 Responses »
Nov 142007
 

The Roman Catholic Bishops just put forth a document that tells Roman Catholics what their moral obligations are in regarding who to vote for.

In case there are any Catholics reading this site, the candidate you vote for must oppose abortion, euthanasia, stem-cell research, same sex marriage, and torture in any form (“torture is always wrong”).  The candidate must also support policy to reduce poverty and aid the poor, provide health care, protect the environment, protect the rights of workers, and take in refugees.

Doing some quick calculations, that means that Catholics following the guidelines of the bishops can vote for any of the following candidates:

Hmmm… a distressingly short list, existing of exactly zero people.  I disagree with a lot of the policy choices in the bishop’s document, but I still find this lack of appropriate representation disturbing.  23% of Americans self-identify as Catholics.  But the US political system makes it impossible that they will ever find representation – because one can’t be a social conservative and a fiscal liberal in this country – the two party system doesn’t allow it.  I’ve already complained in previous posts about how there’s no room for the libertarian position either (Ron Paul being the exception, and despite his tremendous appeal on those grounds, he’s also got some really really really crazy policy ideas).

I have this gut feeling that the two parties don’t actually represent the policy preferences of the majority of Americans.  Which may be why people are getting more and more disillusioned with the political process.  It hardly feels like a democracy when there’s nobody to vote for who represents your point of view.

How can we get a more diverse array of candidates (and I don’t mean diverse in gender or race – that hardly matters if there’s no diversity of opinion)?

On Power

 Posted by  Foreign Policy, Middle East  3 Responses »
Nov 132007
 

Power is one of those concepts that runs political scientists around in circles. If you put a half dozen political scientists in a room, they’ll come up with two dozen definitions and conceptions of the term, and none of them will really like any of them. They’ve been talking about it for years, and they are no closer to agreeing on what it means, how best to measure it, or how it can effectively be used than they were when they started. In general, I tend to think of power as the ability to get someone to do something that they otherwise would not (or might not) do. There are flaws in that definition, but it will suffice for my purposes.

The popular media tends to think about power as the barrel of a gun. Violence is both a necessary and sufficient condition for the exercise of power; that is,the person who controls the means of violence has the power, and an absence of an effective means of violence indicates an absence of power. In other words, if you want to know who is in charge, find the guy who controls the most guns or who has the strongest biceps. Moreover, the translation from violence to power is perfect; the guy with the gun basically always gets what he wants from the people without them. Except for the occasional heroic act the hostages always go where they are told and the captive always gives up his information under torture.

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